Page 30 of Echoes at Driftwood Cottage

Rowan hurried to slap him on the back. “Gee, I’m so sorry.”

He smiled and ended the fake cough. “Gotcha.”

She slapped him on the shoulder. “That’s the thanks I get for offering a lazy morning spent in bed with you. Even after I got breakfast.”

He dug into the croissant. “We need to stay on track. Grab your Gran’s hairbrush, spit into a test tube, and leave both at the lab for comparison.”

“I need to clean up the mess back at the house, anyway,” Rowan suggested. “We should probably take our own pictures of the break-in, too.”

“What do you expect to find inside the safe deposit box? You did locate the key, right?”

Rowan nodded. “It was in that box of stuff from her closet, not the nightstand. Weird. I could swear she kept it there.”

“How come you didn’t think to check it right after she died?”

“Because Gran left her will with her lawyer, Kinsey Wyatt, and a copy of it in one of the drawers of her nightstand. Kinsey had everything lined up for probate. Gran prepaid for her funeral. So that was all taken care of. The will already had paperwork attached to it that I was to give to the bank. Kinsey told me to see Naomi Townsend. Naomi helped me with the money side. There didn’t seem to be a reason to open the safe deposit box until this weekend. To answer your question, I have no idea what’s in there.”

“Hmm.”

“Meaning?”

He lifted a shoulder and wadded up the sandwich wrapper. “I don’t know. I thought my family had a lot of secrets. But yours might be a Pandora’s box ready to pop.”

“Gee, thanks. That’s a cheery thought. So your family had secrets? Do tell.”

Daniel shoved to his feet. He tossed the trash into the bin and gulped down the now-cool coffee. “The uncle I mentioned—”

“Uncle Bobby,” she provided.

“That’s the one,” Daniel nodded and flinched. Like a sour taste in his mouth, he spit out the rest, “He and my mother had a long-time affair.”

Rowan’s eyes widened. “Define long-time.”

“They were carrying on for at least fifteen years. I’m beginning to wonder if Uncle Bobby named me executor of his will because he thought I belonged to him instead of my dad.”

“And he left everything to you, right?”

“Pretty much everything of value, plus a sizeable chunk of money, enough that I could think about starting my own business.”

“Along with the boat,” Rowan added. “Hmm. And he bought you your first car, didn’t he? That’s something a dad might do. Learning about the affair is the reason you had a falling out with your mother.”

“One reason, sure. But not the only one. Look, we should probably get moving if we’re planning to tidy up the house before we go.”

“Thanks for telling me about your family,” Rowan said as she added her trash to the bin. “Knowing that somehow makes me less embarrassed about my own messy backstory.”

“Why be embarrassed? It’s not like we had anything to do with where we came from. We’re not responsible for the life choices our parents made. Right? I need to take a shower and get dressed.”

As he marched past her toward the bedroom, she grabbed his arm. “Maybe you should think about taking a DNA test and finding out your true parentage. Ever think of that?”

Daniel nodded. “Sure. Why not? It might clear up the doubt in my head. We’ll ask the lab for two test kits instead of one. We’ll do it together.”

“Do you have anything they could use to compare your DNA to Uncle Bobby?”

“As a matter of fact, I have his old captain’s hat he wore whenever he went boating. I’ll give them that and see if they can derive any skin cells or sweat from it. Who knows? We could both be opening up a new chapter of our mysterious history.”

Inside the San Sebastian lab, a technician showed them to a small private room—more like a booth—to complete their test kits and bag the items they wanted the lab to compare once the results came back. The entire process took less than thirty minutes.

But when the tech told them it might take as long as eight weeks to get the comparisons done, Daniel dropped Lucien Sutter’s name as an incentive. “He and his wife, Brogan Cole, are the ones who recommended this place. After all the work you did for them, I assumed we’d get our results back with the same speed.”

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